A friend and I were standing on the sidewalk in front of Carnegie Hall Thursday night, following the third concert in Neil Young’s four-night stand of solo shows this week. Oddly, for people who are big enough fans of Young’s to have paid $200 to see him, we were abuzz almost in spite of ourselves.

“But when he plays and sings them, they have this incredibly complicated emotional effect. They just . . . ” My friend found the right word: “They just work.”

He nailed it. You can try and parse Young’s minimalist art like you can try and parse a Mondrian, but that won’t get you very far. Similarly, you can wish he’d play this song or that song, record in this style or that style, but Young will always do exactly what he—if not necessarily his audience—wants, and it’s best just to go along for the ride. Of all the performers who can sell out places like Madison Square Garden when they want, Young is probably the most stubborn. Or rather, since any good artist is stubborn by definition, let’s say that Young is the least inclined to even pretend to curry favor. “People give me a hard time just because I take what I do seriously,” he said at one point during the Carnegie Hall show, possibly in response to a review of the first night’s concert in TheNew York Times, which made much of his calling out the audience for clapping along (but off the beat) with one of his songs, and also alleged that he “groused” when people yelled requests. Young is a Llewyn Davis who somehow succeeded despite his own cussedness, a Llewyn Davis with luck.

I was probably one of the few—if not the only—concert-goer who was disappointed to learn that Young would be playing solo and doing what sounded like it would be a semi-greatest-hits show. I was hoping that for Carnegie Hall he’d move out of his comfort zone—maybe play with strings or a new band, or preview some ambitious new material. Maybe make a case for Trans as one of his greatest albums. Something historic, or weird. Of course, Young has fled his comfort zone with such gusto over the years that he was famously sued by his record label in the 1980s for making “unrepresentative” albums. And come to think of it, I didn’t spend much time with his experimental 2010 album, Le Noise, so who am I or anyone else to complain if Young wanted to perform a friendly bunch of songs from Harvest and After the Gold Rush. And there he was, with an array of acoustic guitars, a couple of pianos, his old pump organ, and the massive cigar-store Indian that’s been accompanying him onstage seemingly forever. It could have been 20 years ago, or 40.

It sounded like it could have been decades ago too. Young sings some of his older songs in lower keys than he did when he wrote them in the 1960s and 70s, but his voice remains unscarred by time—still sweet and plaintive, or, when the song demands, piercing and accusatory. Still singular. His commitment to his muse hasn’t diminished, either. The set list turned out to be a mix of chestnuts like “Heart of Gold,” “Helpless,” and “Old Man,” and tunes that fell somewhere between rarities and potential sing-alongs, among them “Journey Through the Past,” “Mellow My Mind” (wonderful on six-string banjo), and a great old Buffalo Springfield tune with a great old title, “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong.” While he didn’t find any new wrinkles in any of them the way Bob Dylan would have, he didn’t just crank ’em out, either; he put most across as if he’d written them yesterday, their meanings still keen and urgent to him. I was particularly moved by “Harvest Moon,” a love song with autumnal undercurrents (and, at 22 years of age, the evening’s newest number). It was a perfect example of what my friend was getting at: the lyrics are borderline sappy, but when Young sang them, the song came to life with a bittersweet, elegiac edge that almost brought tears to my eyes. (I’m an easy crier but decided to steel myself.)

Maybe Young had Inside Llewyn Davis on his mind. He talked a bit about Greenwich Village in the early 60s, and who he saw perform when he was hanging around as a young folkie. He sang two beautiful covers, one each by Phil Ochs and Bert Jansch, and talked about how the folk scene had evolved into the singer-songwriter scene—“Bob Dylan and some other guys,” he said. “That about sums it up.” Sort of yes, sort of no. But that cagey, deceptive plain-spokenness just about sums up Young too.